As a matter of policy, LINGUIST discourages the use of abbreviations or acronyms in conference announcements unless they are explained in the text. To post to LINGUIST, use our convenient web form at http://linguistlist.org/LL/posttolinguist.html.

We wish to call for papers for the panel 'Universalism and relativism in face-saving: Focus on postcolonial contexts' scheduled for the 39th annual meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE), 30-Aug-2006 to 02-Sep-2006 in Bremen, Germany.

Although the focus of this panel is primarily on face-saving, papers related to the myriad locutionary forms, illocutionary functions, and perlocutionary effects of language communication and communication systems in postcolonial contexts are welcome as well. Papers dealing with natural discourse and issues of cultural displacement, migration, hybridity, diaspora, and the role of public and government media in shaping perceptions of postcolonial history, politics, and regional, ethnic, and social identities will also be considered. With its emphasis on communication and issues of identity, agency, understanding, and empowerment in different postcolonial contexts, this panel wishes to provide a common platform for interdisciplinary cooperation between scholars of different persuasions with interests in language, communication, and postcolonial questions.

The main question this panel wishes to address is: to what extent are the patterns of face-saving claimed by Brown and Levinson (1978) really universal? Since the publication of Brown and Levinson's work, several other works have been published that describe patterns of politeness and face-saving in Non-western cultures that are distinctly different from those in Western cultures. Although some researchers have discussed politeness in certain African and Asian cultures, it is still not established if the further mix of languages and linguistic identities created by colonialism play a significant role in the way speakers in multilingual postcolonial speech communities produce and react to speech acts related to politeness and face-saving. This issue is particularly complex, because language use and abuse play important roles in many areas of postcolonial life. Language can be a powerful mediator of understanding, empowerment, and solidarity, or a source of repression, disempowerment, and discrimination. Choices of what and how (and in what languages) things are expressed stand at the centre of postcolonial pragmatic interest.

If certain face-saving strategies (hedging, complimenting, understating, distancing, etc.) are relatively uniform in Western cultures, as Brown and Levinson claim, how are these realised in postcolonial contexts? What happens to these strategies among speakers who have complex, hybrid linguistic identities built on mixtures of foreign languages imposed during colonialism, indigenous languages, and the languages of wider communication (Pidgins and Creoles)? Do speakers adopt situational faces, using the different languages (and with these, identities) at their disposal to project such faces? Or do they adopt stabile face-saving patterns specific to one language and culture in their daily communication? Answers to these questions could be found by analyzing everyday face-to-face discourse, political and institutional discourse, print media discourse, literary discourse, and all forms of electronically mediated communication.

Papers are invited on the topic of text data mining in its strictest sense: providing users with information not explicitly stated in text. Work submitted to this session will be required to be more ambitious with respect to either theory or reach than the entity identification, information extraction, and information retrieval projects that comprise most work in biomedical language processing.

- Attached files should be named with the last name of the first author ( e.g. altman.ps, altman.pdf, or altman.doc). Hardcopy submissions or unprocessed TeX or LaTeX files will be rejected without review.

- Every paper must be accompanied by a cover letter which must include the following: - The email address of the corresponding author - The specific PSB session that the paper should be considered for - A statement that the submitted paper contains original, unpublished results, and is not currently under consideration elsewhere - A statement that all authors concur with the contents of the paper